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A rhetorical question to be sure! It’s 2012, every website should be mobile-enabled.

We have addressed this issue for both our clients & ourselves. There are a number of factors at play when deciding whether / when to set your website up to be viewed on mobile devices.

4 Questions to ask yourself:

  1. What percentage of current website traffic is coming from mobile devices? In our case, we get about 10% of our traffic via mobile. As an aside, this number has been increasing steadily over time. At this time last year, just over 5% of our web traffic came from mobile devices. And we don’t have a brick & mortar business!
  2. What type of experience are you offering web visitors who do come to your site via a mobile device? Again, in our case, we have just relaunched our website and had taken the opportunity to also create a mobile version for the more ambulatory of our constituents. Do you dare look at your website from an iPhone?
  3. What type of mobile devices are your website visitors using? Thanks to Google Analytics, I discovered that the bulk (+90%) over mobile visitors were getting to us from Apple devices (kicking self in pants for not buying those shares way back when!).
  4. Does your business benefit from foot traffic? If the answer is “yes!”, and you have a mobile-enabled website, then you can stop reading. If it’s “no”, then you need to kick yourself (repeatedly) for not paying attention to what is important. And that is making sure that no matter where your current/potential clients are, they must have access to your website from a variety of devices.

What we did:

  • Looked at GA and determined the volume of mobile traffic over time, and the types of mobile devices that were frequenting our site.
  • Decided what content needed to be on the mobile site. We didn’t put everything up there. Lest we wanted a TMI (Too Much Information) scenario.
  • Built it with goal of maximizing the user experience for users of Apple & Android (it was the second highest source of mobile traffic) devices.
  • Followed the KISS principal.

What we got:

Our Site on an iPad

Our Site on an iPhone

Clean, simple & informative.

An interesting observation. When I look at Google Analytics, I note that our bounce rate for Mobile devices dropped 20% after we set up our Mobile website. On top of that, engagement went way up to 3.11 pages per visits from just over 1 prior to the upgrade. This tells me that when folks hit the WebFuel website from a mobile device, they are engaged. Cannot say the same thing for the time period prior to the upgrade!

Is it time to improve your website’s mobile presence?